An election that's hard to bear

As I walked home from casting my vote, I felt sad. I live in a solid Labour seat so had no hope of my vote counting. I am used to that. In my life as a voter, I have rarely – under Britain’s first-past-the-post system – been on the winning side. The only big win of my democratic life was the vote to leave the EU.

I watched people passing on their way to the polling station and wondered what they were thinking. This is leafy West London. By any logic familiar to the minority of us who live here who were born in this country, my neighbours are not voting Labour from self-interest. Perhaps I should be ashamed to know them so poorly as to have no idea what drives their choice. I am certainly not ashamed not to know the hundreds of them who celebrated on our local streets last October 7th.

credit: Evening Standard | click to enlarge

It looks like Labour will command a majority of about 160 seats in the House of Commons on the basis of a national vote in England & Wales that is down on last time. They’ve won no votes from the Conservatives – only from the SNP in Scotland.

They have achieved their majority without disclosing what they actually intend to do with it. The Conservative Party has lost the support of its voters so comprehensively that all Labour had to do was sit quietly and wait.

As an experienced older voter, that’s not really a problem to me. I know what Labour will do from a lifetime of bitter experience. Their policy is envy and their policy is armed robbery. They’ll waste money, they’ll attack and impede the productive, they’ll raise taxes, they’ll diminish liberty and they’ll subsidise (and therefore encourage) failure.

Labour always leaves both society and the economy worse than it finds them so I know the final decade of my life will be poorer and less pleasant than it would have been. I won’t be alone in that. Life will be poorer and less pleasant for Labour voters too, unless they are on the state’s payroll.

Labour did not deserve to win this election, but the Conservatives richly deserved to lose it. Labour is the accidental beneficiary of the Tories’ national vote losses to Reform UK. The Conservatives comprehensively betrayed their principles over the last fourteen years and have been duly punished by the voters they arrogantly thought of as their own. The one thing they did that “their” people wanted was done with obvious reluctance and under pressure from Reform under its former name of the Brexit Party. They should feel profoundly ashamed for delivering us into the hands of scoundrels. They’re to blame for what will follow as Britain lurches left just as the rest of the free world turns right.

Are there any signs of hope in today’s results? Perhaps. The Overton Window has moved so far left in my lifetime that the entire national discourse now fits within the policies of the Labour Party when I was young. The Reform Party’s vote share suggests this is unjustified. Most people in Britain are some kind of small-c conservative. Most of the time they’re not just disregarded by the Establishment, they’re sneered at and denounced. That’s not going to change anytime soon as the political wing of the public sector unions takes office, but Reform has the chance to give them a voice in Parliament for the first time in decades. Farage is a principled conservative and a skilled orator and I confidently predict he will make some of the most listened-to speeches in the coming Parliament.

I don’t yet see any sign yet of the Conservatives understanding what’s happened. There must be hope that in the weeks and months ahead, they will work out that Labour only won votes in Scotland from the hopelessly incompetent SNP. In England their vote is unchanged. In Wales, where people have a Labour government, it went down. If the Conservative Party is to survive it needs to win votes back from the right. There are none to be had from the left. 

As I type this, I’m listening to Ed Miliband promising to prove to a disillusioned electorate that Government can do good. That’s Labour finally making a concrete promise and it’s one it can’t possibly deliver. Government is a necessary evil, even when confined to reasonable bounds. Our government burst those bounds decades ago and Labour is not the Party to change that. The evils of government can therefore be expected to grow and there’ll be no-one but Labour to blame.

Young voters who don’t know Labour are about to learn some very painful lessons that will contradict the propaganda they heard in the course of their education. I place my hope in our young people. They’ve had a bad deal economically and they’re about to get a worse one. If they are shaped by their experiences, rather than by their education, there’s always hope.